Nanowrimo #4

            “Tom, I need an updated personnel summary for the PS organization.”

            “Okay.”

            “And I just want the data for Q1 and Q2 of next year. Just put it in a pivot.”

            “Sure.”

            It’s tedious work, for sure, but he knows how to get it done. First he downloads a report containing employee data. Then he opens another Excel document with the unvested stock totals. He extracts information by running an Index:Match with the employee data report. Once he has a list of all of the unvested grants he needs, he adds fields that total the dollar amount by year and show the next vesting date. Once he’s done massaging the data, he runs a pivot. But of course, the pivot has to be manipulated. He moves fields around, puts the table in tabular form, hides subtotals, adds subtotals by name, and edits column names. It has to be readable to someone outside of comp. It has to look good.

            Once he’s done, he emails the finished product to his boss, with tabs named ‘raw’ for the raw data, ‘data’ for the extracted information, and ‘pivot’ for a higher level analysis.

            There’s no response. At least he hasn’t fucked up.

            This is his corporate life. Running reports he doesn’t completely understand for people he will never meet.

            At least lunch is good. They are serving fried chicken with mashed potatoes, mac and cheese, and boiled green beans.

            Then he takes the lonely walk back up to his desk. Through the cafeteria hall, past the Building 2 entrance. Then the path to Building 1. Badge in, badge in, badge in. Is he a machine? To press the elevator button. To floor four, where he spent his days.

            How many lifetimes are hidden behind these walls? How many lives are lived in cubicles, working on problems few will ever know or even appreciate?

            After lunch he has to mail merge a few hundred bonus statements and send them out to each employee. So he opens the spreadsheet and the word processor. He selects the .DDE extension to connect the data to the statement. Then he clicks on the Adobe PDF plug-in to send the statements in PDF format. The file’s validated—and the emails go out, 200 at a time.

            As the numbers gradually turn to zero, he contemplates what’s become of his ambition.

            They say that you can tell what age some one stopped drawing by asking them to draw something for you, something simple. ‘I can tell you stopped drawing in the third grade.’ Supposedly it goes.

            He used to write poems in his notebook in between classes. He’d daydream through images and sleep through astronomy lecture. He remembered dashing out of Chaucer and going to play tennis with his friends. And why would he not, when the weather was 70 degrees and as perfect as Philly weather could be?

           

            He has to drink because it is culture and culture is what dictates behavior especially of the working class. It is the norm in Korea for superiors to suggest drinking and for subordinates to accept. To decline is simply rudeness and bad manners. And even at the drinking table, the hierarchies hold. The subordinate pours the liquor with his right hand with his left cupping the bottle.

            He pours his boss a drink. It’s a farce and almost everyone knows it. But the belief functions—the forced comradeship, the honorific greetings, the slight bows—even if no one believes in it. Especially because no one believes in it, it becomes a kind of hallowed tradition in Korea, like Halloween is in the United States.

            He’s come to expect the taste of rice liquor each workday evening. It burns, but not as much as to his throat than to his dignity. It’s no compulsion to drink; it’s like the ether in which they live. And it betrays the stomach-level kind of sadness prevalent in developed economies. How to work without getting burnt out. How to pursue long-term security in place of happiness. How to hold hope for the future when the present looks so bleak.

            This is the middle class life in Korea, and perhaps in the United States. This is how to work until you get carpal tunnel. Until your neck aches from the stress of staring at a screen all day. And why? Why do we suffer this pain so deeply? Is it because the payoff is so little compared to the hardship?

            We do it because it has been done. Because who will be there for our children if we are not? Who will be there for us in our old age, when we can no longer take care of ourselves as when we were younger?

            But really, the travesty is that faith in the system is simply that: faith. It can never be fully validated nor can it be confirmed empirically. The only choice is to participate in the experiment. Some refuse to be part of the control group—some resort to the placebo effect. Still, others drop out. Some are unaware they are in the sample group. And a select few—well, they develop into the successes that somewhat deem the whole affair worthwhile.

            Is it any wonder that dissatisfaction can spike into riots and violence? In some sense, any violence is a sign that the expression of the people has not been possible—it has been futile. They reject the legitimacy of the system, the protestors. And who wouldn't? Isn't it strange that the people who defend the justice system are totally different from the ones who demand justice?